January 6th., 2006: New Year, same
problems. Eventually, HP sent me a pdf relating to the storage tower,
a Compaq ProLiant 3092,
that I picked up for a song from Retro Computers. It is a hot plug
SCSI based piece dating from 1998. Neat if I can find drives
with trays, and then have it work as my main storage repository. It
took a while for HP to find the file, so, should you need it,
here it is. The 3092 should easily connect to one of my two
Compaq ProLiant 800 machines. It will take most drives, including
Fast-Wide SCSI-2, even high speed later types, assuming the drive
cage is compatible. I have been looking for 18.2 and 36.4GB
refurbished items. Not that I can afford them yet; there exists an
Excel file detailing all of the updates, extras and such that I
need. Especially important is finding a P4, with a suitable video
card, that will enable me to use Google Earth, and to add my two
40GB spares to its storage capacity.

This is an interesting photograph, especially
since I am a friend of the great-nephew of this man,
William Manchester. His memoir of
his experiences in the Pacific WWII arena is tremendous. That he can
be so easily criticized for other work is, to me, an insult to a fine man and
a great biographer. I had held this opinion prior to meeting Geoff, his
relative, by reading Manchester's books on Krupp and Churchill. Goodbye, Darkness is horrific and hilarious by turn, and
bears reading, especially with regard to the machinations of the
Pentagon today and yesterday. The blame for Pearl Harbor is
properly assigned to the naval high command. In this month is news that the
Pentagon could
have supplied better body armour to their troops in Iraq, but
thought it not worthwhile. As if they didn't believe that the war is
honourable, one wonders.

This evening, waiting for FP to
download at 2Kbps again, I have moved some parts
around with a view to making my computers work more efficiently.

The working ProLiant 800 server now has all six drives placed on one of its
native SCSI buses. I had had one, the boot drive, running on an Adaptec
2940UW, but decided to move that card to Oxford, the white box that I
use for internet access. One reason was that running a couple of drives on
the Adaptec card caused a problem for the drive I use for programme
downloads, an 18.2GB SCSI. Hardware
failure warnings arose, and sometimes the machine locked. Having to
do a hard reset caused the RAID 5 array to
regenerate each time. Putting all of the drives on the SymBios
875XSJD native adapter has so far proven the proper course to take.

I took two Compaq drives, nominal 9.1GB SCSI Ultra3, from the
stack being held for my other 800 (I shall hunt for Ultra3 SCSI 36.4GB drives
for that machine). These were put on the AHA2940 68-pin internal
connector, and now that Ghost has performed its magic, they have replaced
the older 50-pin drives that were in the box. One of the older, an 8.4GB SCSI-2 drive, has
been moved to my HP PA-RISC pizza box, ready for a Debian
installation, now that I have downloaded the network ISO and burnt
it to CD. All I need now is an external SCSI CD-ROM, and then we'll
see how that will run.

Oxford is now running smoothly with these two Wide Ultra3 SCSI
drives sitting on the floor of the case and humming quietly to
themselves. My other main machine, the Compaq DeskPro EN6530, has
started working properly since I removed the Promise Ultra 100TX2
card. This had been used to load two 40GB drives which are too large
for the Compaq BIOS, even with the latest update. Nearly every day I had
had to hard reboot the machine since the drives, seemingly in
unnatural combination with the Promise card, had in some way
locked up the box. Only thing to do was to shut down the computer.
Now that I have removed the card, I am still waiting for a lock up,
but it so far has confounded my expectations. And , now that I have
cleaned up all the unneeded services, that still were operating
after I had demoted it from a domain controller, it appears to be
running quicker. It does need more RAM.

January 8th., 2006: MyHosting, which, as its
name states, hosts sites, hosts mine. All three of them. All three
are currently run under MS Windows Server 2003, and the web server
used
is Microsoft, IIS/6.0. My periodic problems with downloading my sites
to my own network resurfaced. I had not downloaded them since the
change from NetNation to MyHosting last year: when one is using
dial-up it can't be done in a reasonable time.

Now that my internet connection is 3Mb/sec adsl, and
I have a great deal to upload and change on my sites, I thought that
I should check downloading rates again. I found that they were slow
once more, even if, that is, I was comparing by date stamp and not
by file changes. I use FrontPage 2003 (Office 11) SP2, and regularly
check for updates and apply them. Everything should work properly,
hein?

Emailing MyHosting via my management page at their
site, I discovered that Microsoft put out a fix more than a month
ago. The techie couldn't find the link, and I have made three
requests for it.
Here is a Windows Server page at MS about IIS 6.0 and so forth:
complex indeed.

Now then, the rates were improved on each of my
sites, and that's fine, but what is the fix, and why won't they tell
me, and why can't I find it on a Support search on the MS site? Does
it change security levels? It is a registry fix, I do know that. It
is, therefore, a real bug, and although the techie said it was a
recognised intermittent problem, well, it occurred on all three of
my domains, so it can't be that rare. Googling shows that a lot of
people have had the same problem.

January 9th., 2006: Well, it would seem I was
correct about the Promise Ultra 100tx2 being the source of Rutland
seizing frequently. I inserted an Adaptec AHA2940AU in its place:
added a small SCSI-2 hard drive and connected the ScanJet IIc to it.
Scanner works fine, and the hard drive runs smoothly. And, it hasn't
seized. So, don't use a Promise card if you can avoid it. Especially
since it uses an EZ-drive, whatever that might be. At the very least it
prevents Partition Magic from working.

I was on the MyHosting chat with us over the internet
support line: type your question into a box, etc. It appears that
there is a bug in FrontPage on the server side, on the hosting
server. Something to do with server extensions, IIS that is, and
Windows Server 2003. The problem is accepted by Microsoft, and there
is a hot fix, but it has not been disseminated. There is a line in
the registry that fixes the slow download problem, but what the bug
actually is hasn't been properly explained to me. Searching on the
Microsoft site proves fruitless. Too much time wasted, because one
doesn't know which parameters to use.

January 14th., 2006: At last, a reasonable
reason for the download of sites to computers on my network.
MyHosting technical support finally sent me a link to this MS page:
Event ID 1000 warning messages are logged on the server each time
that you perform an authoring action on a Web site. It is
somewhat laughable, however, that the associated link on the page
one reaches about FrontPage Server Extensions does not exist! Oh,
well, at least an answer, for which I am grateful. I have posted
this information on a couple of sites, just for information
purposes. People should be made aware that their problems may have a
real cause, hein?

And, one should recognize that this fix is simply not
permanent. The download problem has not disappeared, and it seems
ridiculous to inform technical support every time that it occurs.
The rate has slowed when I simply added today's data, from a recent
18-20KBps to 6-8KBps today. Rats!

January 16th., 2006: Strange that even though
I changed the video card to a newer ATi Rage XL, and downloaded and
installed new drivers, the ProLiant 800 still freezes periodically.
Event viewer showed that there was a problem with the older ATi card
and I hoped this change would stop that. To no avail, and hard
reboot causes yet another rebuild of the RAID-5 array. It appears to
happen under FireFox, and not when using IE. This is a
dual-processor machine, and maybe that has something to do with it,
too. Who knows?

January 24th., 2006: Not all NICs work
faultlessly. I was wondering why this machine frequently lost
contact with the Web. I had to constantly check the diagnostics of
the switch, thinking that it was dropping the connection. When I
checked the other machines connected to the Web, it was revealed
that there was something else wrong. They were always connected. So,
I swapped the NICs in this machine, Oxford. The 3Com was made the
local network NIC, and the NetGear became the DHCP NIC, with nothing
but TCP/IP enabled. Voila, everything works as advertised.

At least, now that we have a Thatcher clone elected
in Canada, I can be glad that my internet connection is cured and I
can pursue the idiocies of this new Prime Minister. His underwear is
fundamentalist, and his outerwear and glowering mien show the
pressure this brings.

January 26th., 2006: Is it the dual processor,
or is it something else? If I use FireFox 1.5 or IE 6+ then after a
while I close the programmes and that does nothing. But if I reopen
them then the computer, the ProLiant 800, seizes solid, permanently.
Then it is necessary to press the power switch, and after reboot to
wait whilst the RAID-5 regenerates. Every bloody time. The FireFox
browser expects to send error reports, but it can't if it can't
remember what happened. I wonder if it is related to Java applets or
Macromedia stuff on certain sites. Probably the latter. Whatever it is I can't determine
the cause because there is no way to gracefully restart the machine.

January 29th., 2006: Of course, it was very
silly to try and send an error report to Adobe about the ProLiant
seizing up by using the ProLiant. The page about Macromedia Flash
Player was, itself, running flash, so there was a blue screen of
death as I tried to complete the entries. I went to another machine
to input a report as I waited for the ProLiant to reboot and
regenerate. There were errors relating to event viewer messages that
arose because of this, for which see the images above. Not
particularly useful, at least for me, since they are somewhat
cryptic.

Consequently, when things had quietened down, the
machine was gracefully restarted. I have heard that an
acquaintance's Intergraph box is constantly crashing. It too is a
dual processor, PII, box. Perhaps for the same reasons? But he's the
fool who persists in using internet messaging, so who knows?

January 30th., 2006: Thinking about this
constant problem with my oldish, but still eminently usable,
ProLiant, I wonder if I shall hear about more and more disasters
with the increasingly more numerous sales of dual processor and
dual-core processor based computers. Given, for one example, that HP
sells a dual-core AMD based media PC, then anyone buying one and
finding Macromedia Flash screws up their surfing will be irate. I do
hope that I hear from Adobe soon, with a cure.

February 3rd., 2006: It may be that my problem
with seizing/blue screen on Gloucester has been cured.
Macromedia/Adobe sent me an email (I have corrected the grammatical
error, slight as it may have been):

Hi Paul,
Thanks for writing Technical Support.

Should problems persist, try the following steps:
1. Delete the Flash folder located in C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\
(For Windows 2000 I believe the directory should be C:\Winnt\system32\Macromed)
2. Run the Flash MSI installer via this link

Hope that helps.
Best regards,
Jervis
Product Support
Macromedia, now part of Adobe Systems

(And note that their recent,
March '06, monetary status reveals that purchasing Macromedia has
cost them dearly).

Now then, it wasn't quite as simple as that, given where
the root directory on Gloucester actually lies. But, it was simple
enough to find and to delete
the folder. Then, when I clicked the link in the email, it took me to the file to
download and allowed me to install the saved Active X executable.

When I had finished
installation, I went to the Flash test page, whereupon I was asked if I
wanted to download the latest version, which is 10.1 or similar. I
had wondered why the test graphics
hadn't appeared before this offering appeared. So, having agreed, it started to install, and
also asked
me to add Yahoo's tool bar, which I declined.

Finally, having
finished the installation, I went to a couple of sites, including
Adobe and Macromedia, both of which use Flash, and, so far,
nothing untoward has happened. Time will tell.

March 18th., 2006: Nothing helps if one fails
to read the instructions. Well, in this case, it doesn't work
because it's not an Ultra2/3 SCSI drive, but an Ultra160. The
machine I was upgrading kept telling me that the disk had failed,
and no wonder. Since it was the second ProLiant 800 that I have, and
I was bringing it up to workable condition, I wanted an 18GB boot
drive. The used drive I bought was, I thought, suitable. Not so,
because I never read the label underneath it.

The computer is, however, working now, with somewhat
less RAM than I expected. I had thought I had obtained another box,
for cannibalistic purposes, that had all of the necessary parts. It
had one 256MB and one 64MB, not the two 256MB DIMMs I had been told
it contained. Also, with the 18GB
drive proving unworkable (the Ultra160), there were only four 9.1GB
Ultra2 10k spinners available for use. Therefore, unlike the other ProLiant 800, I used JBOD, not RAID-5. But, it works well enough and
will become another AD box when I feel up to it. RAM and another
drive will be added when I can find the money and the pieces.

March 25th., 2006: Hunting for another
monitor, given that one of my main 21"beasties is starting to give
horizontal "tearing" which is indicative of capacitors wearing out
in its power supply. I think I'll go down to a 17", because if it
takes 1600x1200 that's all I need. I have that setting on a 17"
attached to one of my ProLiant 800s, and that works fine. Only $25
second-hand at Retro. And I found another Ultra160 drive. I will
have to find a proper adapter now.

April 7th., 2006: Today, in London, or
wherever she may be, my elder daughter reaches 35. There was a
comedy skit about that by someone, quite a long time ago, and I've
been trying to remember the source. Something like, "thirty-five
years" in a long, low growl. No idea how Sarah feels at this stage
of her life. I do know that she was in India recently, and had a
revealing time there.

Now, back to work. my sole Compaq DeskPro EN has been
problematic. Signs of the monitor failing and occasional seizing of
the system. I had had an Adaptec 2940AU inserted, to cope with my
ScanJet IIc and an attendant small SCSI hard drive. The wires for
the hard drive had to be routed via a shallow groove on a part of
the frame. This meant that when rolling on the side panel, it
grabbed the signal/power cable and put pressure on the connectors.
Result meant I had to lean the side panel against the computer. Not
clever, given what transpired. Yesterday evening, I took an unused
Adaptec 2906 in another IBM box, and replaced the SCSI adapter in
the EN. I also placed the hard drive in an external box. Sorting out
the cables and ensuring the terminator was on the correct connector
has enabled me to screw on the side panel. Everything is now running
quite well. The heating is normal, and the monitor seems, at this
stage, to have stopped producing horizontal streaming of text and
such.

May 10th., 2006: Watched the UEFA Cup game.
Sevilla winners by 4-0 over Middlesbrough. Thrashed unmercifully,
even if the referee should have given the losers a clear penalty
when it could have mattered.

Now back to the EN mentioned above. A friend gave me an external
SCSI hard drive box. This was used to remove the hard drive from
within the EN. I had enough spare cables to connect it to the ScanJet and have them both work. Now that that was done, it was
possible to properly close the EN case. This promptly cured the
monitor problem and the machine has not seized once.

I eventually
removed the smaller of the installed hard drives and replaced them with 20GB and 30GB
AT examples from Cornwall. Having copied over the files and renamed the
drives before installing them, when the computer was restarted it
worked properly immediately. That was a real shock, having had
problems with similar operations previously. Now it has three larger
drives and works better, now there is no swap drive snafu.

Cornwall has been demoted, since it is a desktop IBM PII 400MHz
and one cannot add enough peripherals or drives. I will probably
install Debian for X86 on it, using the two 9.54GB AT drives I took
from the EN box, Rutland. It will be renamed, and then connected to
the network. Having installed MS SFU (services for UNIX), on my
other Windows 2k servers, it should be possible to fully implement
the uses I plan for it

Not too long ago, I was moving some stuff around and rehurt my hip.
So, I was not cured as I had thought I was. Sod it! However, having
bought another ProLiant 800, I have built it up as a replacement for
Cornwall, and it is now running well with a JBOD formation. Five
drives in total, and one, 18.2GB, has been used for the OS, Windows
2k SP4. All three of my ProLiant 800s have the maximum RAM, four
sticks of 256MB ECC in each. One needs a monitor, and is running
headless at this time just as a unit to copy data to. One thing of
interest to me is that of the three machines one has one drive that
equates to the volume of all four of the drives in another. Most of
the SCSI drives are 9.1GB and they all run at 10k. There are two
18.2GB drives, and then there is one 36.4GB. Can you see how they
are related? Multiples of discs seemingly producing their basic
capacity. Most are Compaq drives but there are others in the mix,
all compatible.

The other thing that quit was my D-Link switch. That had replaced my
NetGear switch, that had died last summer. Don't know why, but
oddly enough just powering up the old NetGear switch proved it still
worked. Why on earth it had seemingly broken down before is not
known. So, my network still runs, but I shall have to find another
switch to keep as a spare. It was a real horror to think that
everything was halted because of the failure of one piece of equipment. Now that
the NetGear FS308 has been resurrected I can continue working on PHP
and allied self-learning. But, my fingers are permanently crossed.

May 24th., 2006: Lots of problems lately. Mainly, because AD
needed cleaning up, two computers were incorrectly denied access to
the network, and, therefore, couldn't be logged on. After using
several tools: and finding out that several were outdated, I went to
Daniel Petri's site again. That had a clear procedure for using
ntdsutil to remove some redundant settings. The instructions on
Microsoft's site are unclear, as is the help file for the actual
utility. Then, having had trouble using adsiedit.msc, I discovered
that there are Support Tools available for Win2k SP4. That helped:
and that's an understatement. Now, having had to reinstall Win2kAS
again on one of my ProLiant 800s, it is now clear that the network
works. What a relief.

And, given that a friend has obtained an Adaptec 29160N SCSI card
for me from eBay, I shall soon be able to install the two spare
Ultra160 drives in hand. The other thing is that I was able to find
a second-hand IBM eServer. It's a Series 220 model with a three-port
hot swap cage. Now to find used converged IBM drives that will fit.
That box has an AT 40GB drive for the OS, allowing me to have the
three SCSI drives for storage. The ease of updating the BIOS was
also a plus. It had version 1.04, and I downloaded the 1.07 update.
The executable allowed me to run it in Windows and reboot to finish.
It succeeded, cured a SCSI seeprom error, and now works smoothly. Good
stuff: somewhat different from earlier methods of updating any BIOS.

Here is the answer to a clue in a recent Guardian
Weekly crossword written by Paul (not me): The Arnolfini Portrait,
1434, Jan van Eyck:

May 30th., 2006: Oddments: at Retro Computers
on Bronson today I found a CD external drive, SCSI, for my HP 9000 712/60
PA-RISC machine. Exactly the correct model, plus cables, for a
really good price. Simply need to find a power module. But, they are
gnats teeth in availability, it seems. And, they are expensive.

I was down there because the 30GB AT drive, that I had removed from
the eServer x220 because I had a larger one handy, was in denial.
What happened was that it gave me a Disk I/O error: status =
00001001: I tried everything to try to fix this, because although
the drive was recognised in the BIOS on two machines, it was
invisible to the OS even when using the Recovery Console to try to
run fixboot or fixmbr. So, Brian told me that the server came from
the RCMP, and that they often installed a programme to screw any
attempt to use the drive to install anything: OS installation or
NTFS formatting to use as a slave. I expect to hear that Brian has
fixed it somehow, or to be given a replacement.

June 5th., 2006: Monday before the Friday that
starts the games for WC2006. The Ultra160 drives that I had were
placed in a server and now work. One of the drives was unusable, and
I was able to exchange it after going through a few machines at
Retro. Now, I have two 18.2GB 10K drives: one of them runs the OS:
Win2kAS SP4 + Roll Up. Nice and smooth and enables me to work on
other machines now that one has six drives of decent size. I am not
a gamer, or someone who downloads movies, so I don't need space for
those items: merely for web pages and text. And the databases.

June 6th., 2006: Of course, the credulous
idiots are claiming that today is the day of Satan: a combination of
6 and 6 and 6. As if the calendar was accurate. How many times has
it been changed, and which calendar of which culture is to be
recognised? And, when was, in the Christian world, the actual birth?
Back to reality: what a difference having the correct Ultra160 cable
makes. The SCSI BIOS woke up with 160 instead of 40, which was the
megabyte rate prior to installing the twisted cable. Nice to see how
things move along now.

July 1st., 2006: England knocked out of the
FIFA World Cup, by two horrendous decisions: one by the referee, one
by the now unemployable England incompetent manager. Not that the
result was exactly unexpected. Also, Brasil was knocked out by
France. Huzza!! Zidane and pals were excellent and nice to watch.
Unlike the English penalty kick twerps. Only one scored by England
was the previously unacknowledged Owen Hargreaves, who had a
tremendous game.

Click above to see the photo of my father at almost
87, and my daughter of eleven and some months. The presence of my
sister, visiting from Auckland, New Zealand, with her digital
camera, has enabled me to have a photo placed here of today's date.

Now then: Retro Computer has come almost good again.
Brian, the owner, told me that the hot-swap drives in a Dell
PowerEdge 2400 should fit in my IBM x220. Not so, they were out by
about a thirtysecondth of an inch. However, after playing with the
placing of the drives in the hot swap cage on the 2400, I attached
an Ultra160 capable cable to the backplane and to the other two
Ultra 160 drives I took from a ProLiant 800. This gave all of the
drives in the machine the nominal 160MB/s transfer rate. It really
made a difference when using the computer at all times.

The reason I had to rearrange the drives in the cage
was the ordering of the SCSI buses on start up. These were altered
when I updated the BIOS and the motherboard firmware. The IDs on the
hot-swap drive cage are numbered. Thus, ID0 took control for the
boot device for the Win2kAS start up. This was not desired since the
Adaptec 29160N was attached to the OS drive on ID0, and ID1 was
given to the other Ultra 160 drive. So, to have it all work with the
current setup, I moved the two hot-swap drives in the bays marked
ID0 and ID1 to the empty bays ID4 and ID5. Then, when I booted up
the machine, the IDs were properly allocated for all six Ultra 160
drives. Took me a time to sort it out, and I learned something about
having multiple SCSI controllers in one machine. This will have to
be watched whenever I install a RAID adapter.

As I have mentioned, I'm looking for an Adaptec Ultra 160 RAID card.
If this proves possible to obtain cheaply, then I can attach the four Ultra 160
hot-swap drives to it and convert them to RAID 5. This will make
them truly hot-swappable, which can't be done with the Adaptec
29160n card that they're attached to at the moment. And, with the
RAID card, I can find
two more drives to fill the bay and create more storage.

The other thing is that the IBM x220 now has a 133MHz
cable connection for the two 40GB AT drives. They now work at the
proper connection rate. Took me a while to sort out the positioning of the
cables in the machine: snakepit.

July 2nd., 2006: Every time I start up the
Dell PowerEdge 2400, but only after I updated the BIOS, etc., (and
installed SP4 Rollup and all the other stuff that is required) I
receive a new hardware message. This is for the Dell 1x6 backplane
on the AIC-7890 onboard SCSI. The hardware is installed and, as the
second image shows, is working properly. This is a pain, and
searching Dell is fruitless, as is the Windows 2000 support on
Microsoft's site.

Above are the two relevant images, click to enlarge.
The first shows the start up screen after logging onto the computer.
The second shows the properties page for the device. It states it is
working properly. Well, it has to be, otherwise the machine wouldn't
be working, would it? Daft situation, but I can't cure it so far.
Dell has a DPA04.exe producing an .inf file that is supposed to
remove the yellow query in hardware. It does not succeed. There are
pages in Microsoft support relating to unsigned drivers, but no real
help, even using sigverif, in the Resource Kit. Whatever, it is
minor, but distracting.

July 3rd., 2006: Apropos the Dell 1x6
backplane: one thing the hardware tells me is that there is an
Adaptec AHA-2940U2/U2W in the computer!! Windows 2000 Advanced
Server SP4 + Roll Up, plus all the other stuff that updates produce.
It should be an Adaptec AIC-7880. This after the updating of the
Adaptec drivers, too. No wonder the installation bug arises.
Something doesn't know what it should be doing.

But, something has just occurred to me. Given that
the backplane is there, that the drives are attached to it, but that
the Adaptec 29160N has the cable attachment and not the motherboard,
perhaps if I reattached the drives to that the error would
disappear. That could be the answer because the BIOS would then be
loaded, which it currently is not for the Adaptec AIC-7890 that held
the hot-swap drives in the original state. Not likely, however, that
I shall bother if I obtain a RAID adapter. I'd rather do that than
mess with the on-board RAID, which needs a key that I don't have
anyway.

July 24th., 2006: Odd date, just that it means
I am 64 and one third years old. So, one wonders, how does one gain
employment in these semi-ageist times?

Now then, anything that happens when one watches the
Tour de France is astonishing, at times. Floyd Landis won after the
most amazing recovery of anyone's memory to regain prominence and
the ultimate yellow jersey in Paris last Sunday. Brilliant and
nerve-wracking at once.

Computers: the Dell 2400 now has an Adaptec 3200s
RAID card. It, too, now that I have updated all of the SMOR, BIOS,
NVRAM oddments, shows the 1x6 backplane working, but not installed,
even if it is, when Windows starts. Never mind, everything works,
and the RAID card has improved the computer. Having turned off the
booting option, when I find two more hot-swap drives they can be
installed and the RAID-5 setting expanded. Later, later. Compared
with another machine, which is using Win2k software for the RAID set
up in disk management, not a card, the Adaptec 3200s works
instantly. No re-reading of the drives as happens at every start up
for the other machine.

Retro Computer should have more SCSI based
machines for sale soon. A friend, who has helped me obtain a few goodies
from eBay, wants me to reserve him a rack-based computer, should one
appear at the store. I might follow his lead, because it would
enable me to sort out the space in my cell, and make things more
efficient. Money is tight, of course. Additionally, the government
bureaucracy is slow in mailing out GST refunds this quarter. After
telling me I was late in submitting my return, which was not true,
and then stating that they were overworked (!), I eventually received
the cheque. I went after cashing it to complete the payments owing for
my eBay
purchases: Starbucks old chubby ceramic mugs and the
Adaptec 3200s.

August 2nd., 2006: Yesterday, after having
swapped an inadequate 3Com switch for an external, slow SCSI-2
Yamaha CD writer, I tried installing it into the Dell 2400. The
installed SCSI card, an Adaptec 2920, would not
show the device, whatever I tried. So, I took the chance and added
it to the daisy chain
on Oxford, which has an Adaptec 2940UW. This worked straightaway,
after ensuring no ID conflict.
Odd, what? Will try to move it to the next server I acquire.
Thankfully, it
runs and it works. Speed is not everything.

August 8th., 2006: It would be better to pay
attention to what is written on the labels of my hard drives. What I
have done in the past few hours is swap drives in two of my ProLiant
800 boxes. I found, because I was searching the web for information,
that some of the drives I had thought were Wide Ultra 2 SCSI, were
in fact Ultra160 items. This meant that I firstly rearranged the
Dell box and removed an Adaptec 29160n card. I placed all of the drives
on the two internal connections on the Adaptec 3200s RAID card.
After ticking the boot up allowed configuration box, this allowed the Dell PowerEdge to start up and run as smoothly as ever.

Then, the drives
in the ProLiants were arranged: Gloucester now has six Wide Ultra 2
drives, all 9.1GB, four in a RAID 5 disposition, and all running at
10k. Then, I placed all of the Ultra160 drives in Antrim, attached to the Adaptec 29160n card. The Dell's drives run at 160MB/s, as they damn
well should, and so should the Antrim drives.

A problem with my Office 11 installation on Gloucester
was cured by remembering to alter the drive letter. The drive I took
out was set as D: and I had installed its smaller replacement and forgot to
check the drive letter, which was C:. Once that was rectified, the normal Tuesday
update of security and other matters from MS, was done successfully.

August 10th., 2006: What I discovered with
Antrim is that the Compaq BIOS hides the SCSI Ctr-A option screen.
That's no good: I therefore trotted down to my storage and recovered
four 9.1GB Wide Ultra 2 drives. These I placed in Antrim after
removing all four of the Ultra160 drives. Just a few adjustments and
most things work as they should. Now I have 5 Ultra160 drives to
place in the next server I find. That will be one to replace one of
my aging Intel PII 350 boxes. One is the AD box, and is working
satisfactorily: but only because the load on it is minor. Few
machines for it to bother with currently.

August 30th., 2006: Interesting stuff lately,
if you're interested. It started off with an XP Pro upgrade to
Oxford, my W2kPro box. It worked in a way, except that I couldn't
use Windows Update. I had straightaway activated the machine. I then, because
there was nothing in the Networking applet, the icons in the quick start bar failed to appear, and other things on the computer,
tried all of the tricks offered by Microsoft to allow me to do the
update. Nothing worked concerning update rights. So, I tried
re-installing/repairing XP Pro SP2. That for some reason cancelled the activation,
which now failed every time I tried it.

Next, I tried the activation tips on Daniel
Petri's site, with registry tweaks et al. Nada, nada, nada and then I
decided to use the activation screen, phone option. It produced a set of
numbers. I phoned the offered number and spoke with a robot which
told me I had what appeared to be an improper installation. I then
was passed to a guy in India.
Eventually, after I had told him about the snafu, he gave me a set of numbers, and voilà, the machine is
validated, once again. After a reboot, I still could not run update. So, I
go to another page on MS, concerning users. Following the
instructions, I check my users status, and, which is what I should have done
in the first place, ensured that the administrator was included. All
updates to other computers, non-XP, had never produced this
situation. My normal user name and status had been downgraded to debugger.
Yes, a real Microsoft user name, not what I am, so there!!

Anne-Louis Girodet-TriosonPortrait du citoyen Belley, ex-représentant des Colonies,
1797,
Huile sur toile - 159 x 111 cm
Versailles, Musée national du château et de Trianon
I have always been interested in colour representation. Having seen
that Montréal's Museum of Fine Art has an exhibition, Girodet:
Romantic Rebel which had been advertised through an article in the
Globe and Mail, November 18th., 2006, where there was a black and
white copy of this portrait. I found two versions that look quite
different. It's a pity I can't afford to visit the actual exhibition
to see what it actually looks like. Given that my younger daughter,
Katharine, visited me on the same day I read the article and she's
milk chocolate, one subsequently wonders about a lot of things.

Continuing the computer discussion: this is the page that cured
the update problem on the XP Pro box: there were no proper
entries:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/910338/en-us.
Now Outlook works, although a little bit freakily. Just
have to keep at it. (But, see below.)

When I rebooted, it was a different ball game: all of
the icons appeared, the networking applet was filled with the proper
NICs, and Windows update worked. Did it ever, there were about 60MB
of downloads to cope with. Having done that and found that everything
sort of worked, I went to use Outlook and found it totally
non-responsive, and also giving errors. So did a lot of other programmes.

The cause was simple, and I'll tell you now what it was, in case you
have no SCSI interests. The cause of all problems was simply a
rabbit-eared connector being a tiny bit loose on one of my external SCSI
drives.

Firstly, I put in two more SCSI Ultra 2 Wide drives
to try and increase the usable space by spanning them. Errors
galore, glacially slow copying. So much so that I removed them and
used one as the temp and swap space drive on another server. Next,
Outlook still buggy and slow, and every time I had to reboot as
things were updated, one of the drives was repeatedly check-disked. I
lost some data, and nothing was working as well under XP Pro SP2 as it
had under Win2kPro SP4. Recently, I had obtained a cheap external
SCSI Yamaha CD-RW. This had stopped working and was removed from the
chain because the Adaptec start up would hang. I should have known
right then what the error was.

I had found that trying to install the Recovery
Console stopped with the statement that the computer held newer
files than the XP Pro share folder. This seemed wrong to me, so I
downloaded XP SP2 and, after expanding into a folder, slip-streamed
the XP Pro share. Then, I ran Recovery Console install and the
operation caused an immediate check with MS and the downloading of
newer files into the share. This means that the Recovery Console is
up to date at this time. Neat, indeed.

Then I found the loose connection, because I wanted
to add a CD-RW to another machine and thought I would reuse the
Yamaha CD-RW to see if it would work on a different adapter. The cable from the Yamaha to
the external hard-drive box was fractionally loose. After a week's
work, I should have checked my cables prior to this: it almost
certainly happened
when I had moved another server which had had the Yamaha drive sitting on
its top. I installed the Yamaha in a machine with
an Adaptec 2906 card and it worked straight away.

I then found that my main internet machine was working
far
quicker. Outlook has started to work as fast as it did before, and I
have errors reaching sites due to rapidity rather than slowness. The
drives all seem healthy, and the racket I was worried about, caused by searching on the
SCSI internal drives, is back to its own usual level.

A few of the links I have found useful lately have
been Sysinternals, Daniel Petri and a couple of others. These quotes,
taken from recent emails I sent to friends, should clarify this:

c)
This page has a link to downloadable boot sector for XP and
instructions to make a bootable CD:
http://old.bink.nu/xpbootcd/ This site is also linked
to Petri’s slipstreaming for Win2000/XP page.

Now, it's computer moving
time in my cell. I need extra space, so I am having to move
certain boxes around to make a better arrangement. We'll see. I
will try installing an extra spare SCSI drive into Oxford once
more, just to see if everything works as it should.

August 30th., 2006:
The moving of computers, boxes, books and odds and ends proved
successful. More efficient use of space, and less of a need to
slip sideways around projections in the cell.

September 3rd., 2006:
Root kit problem has arisen. I visited SysInternals again to see
if there was an update to their free RootKit Revealer. There
was and, after downloading, I ran it. The problem on this XP Pro
SP2 box is shown in the jpeg that opens if clicked.I have tried to delete the key using RegEdit, but
it will not. Neither will clicking on the item open it. So, what
are embedded nulls? Visiting SysInternals again, I found
RegDellNull which can be used to delete such keys in the
Registry. I downloaded, unzipped, and ran the command. It asked
if I should delete the key it found at the same place. I agreed
with
deletion, ran RegEdit again, and it has gone.

One nice thing is that NCF (Ottawa: National
Capital Freenet,
http://ncf.ca ) has upgraded their DSL offering to 5Mbps
from 3Mbps at no extra charge. Great news, and it has made a
difference. I tested my connection using
http://speakeasy.net/speedtest and it came back with a
download rate from Ottawa to Chicago of 3962kbps and an upload
of 628kbps. Given I'm at an unknown distance from the
distribution point, this is still an excellent rate for Can$30
and change.

September 7th., 2006: What it is to have
downloaded EasyPHP1-8 and installed it on one computer with no
attendant problems: to use with an O'Reilly book. Then, to use a SAMS book, I downloaded the latest standard versions of MySQL,
Apache and PHP 5.1.6. The latter gave me a few hours of trouble.
Following the instructions to the letter prevented Apache from
running, always with an error on the PHP line. Read, follow
instructions, fail, follow instructions. Repeat and fail. Eventually, I googled
"Apache 2.x.x cannot load phpapache2.dll". Should have done that
earlier. I found that I should have downloaded the experimental PHP and
copied over the phpapache2_2.dll to the PHP folder. I did that, and
immediately everything worked.

What would have been possible
without a search engine? Probably impossible to cure, since the PHP site does not, at this date, have the fix elucidated.

One other hardware fix done, too: Ferret, a Wide
Ultra 2 SCSI drive has been giving chkdsk errors on boot up on
the main email machine. Checking after that and finding that it
was deemed healthy, I copied all of the folders to another
drive. Eventually, after a format and a reboot, I renamed the other
drive to Ferret, and spanned what was Ferret with another drive,
Eland. Gives more space to Eland, and they are similar drives,
so that should cure the problems for a while.

September 18th., 2006: The day that Maher
Arar is cleared by the O'Connor report, censored though it is.
About time that was cleared up, and the compensation for him,
his family, and others that have been improperly tortured or
otherwise dealt with, distributed in quick time.

Now, Crucial have a scanning executable, to
determine what and what would be available regarding a
computer's RAM. Odd results on a couple of my computers: one
gives ECC where none is; one states maximum of 384MB is usable,
when that computer already runs 768MB; one cannot be read at
all, even though the model is on their list. This scanning tool
is one I am going to use on several computers I need to repair
and upgrade for friends/acquaintances. Two are Dell boxes with
front-end bus differences and two optional clock speeds for RAM:
and the system does not tell one which has which.

October 18th., 2006: Three different
installations of PHP, MySQL and Apache on three differing
computers. Using Julie Meloni's SAMS Teach Yourself, edition 1,
the first few examples in the chapters worked on all machines.
Suddenly, upon reaching more complicated scenarios, the main
self-learning machine failed to load any example. This is the
one that had the latest software, that I downloaded and
installed, and then set them up to talk to each other. The other
two machines run XAMPP and EasyPHP 1.8 respectively. Not until I
discovered that at
http://thickbook.com there were the examples available from
the latest editions, was I able to run them. Correlating
the different scripts, I discovered that mysqli was the reason.
I had used that in preference to the basic mysql as required in
the configuration instructions. The latest scripts include
mysqli, so everything has quietened down. The older scripts run
on the other two machines, since they use older versions, 4x, of
PHP, etc.

I won't insult others I have dealt with lately:
there have been some ridiculous problems due to people simply
not thinking about what they were doing. With regard to
computing that is, not to do with transporting goods on passenger filled
airplanes without having secured them, or of purloining body
parts from the elder dead and selling them to unsuspecting
hospitals.

November 6th., 2006: I obtained an ML570
server recently. It is heavy, and well built, but at first it
wouldn't boot up. Taking every processor out, blowing on each of them to
remove lint, and doing the same for the banks of memory seemed
to cure the cryptic error messages. I wrote them down,
laboriously, in case I needed them later: thank goodness I
didn't.

Also, plugging in both of the power supplies stopped the
other rtfm problem. So, now it has Windows 2000 Advanced Server
SP4 and updates installed. When I mention updates, I mean 142MB
on the initial scan. These were for the OS and for Office. It
proved how well my dsl connection works: it did not take long,
even though the installation of the updates failed in several
instances, and required another go at it. That worked
successfully, and the machine is ticking along nicely with only
two Ultra160 36.4GB drives installed attached to an Adaptec
29160n that I placed in one of the hot swap PCI slots.

There is
a need to find an Ultra320 version for any of those I can find.
That's because there is room for a dozen hot swap drives in this
quad PIII Xeon 900MHz beastie. It will take Ultra320 drives
which would run at their native speed if the proper adapter is
running things.

This image shows that having a 32 bit machine
precludes the use of all of the memory installed, which is
5.120GB. There are three matched sets of memory, one of 1028MB
and two of 2048MB. The latter cannot be placed in the first four
slots, according to Kingston, who provided the extra RAM.

I am gradually clearing out my older machines, or
more correctly I am ejecting the slower PII boxes I have. This is being
written using one of them, simply because it's handy to work on.
However, it won't take the latest Nero CD/DVD writing programme
without a hiccough, and it has too many small drives and too
little memory to work well without constant reboots to clear things up a
little.

It is running XP Pro SP2, which works quite well. I will
try to move the boot drive to a faster machine and attempt to
reactivate XPPro if that is required: the usual robot/Asiatic Indian
scenario may be required. Painful to realise that Microsoft,
common with other concerns, goes where the labour is cheapest.
How, one wonders, do the worker ants in the US buy their SUVs
and mansions that ensure their energy usage is maintaining its
world domination.

November 18th., 2006: One lucky fellow freed by Musharraf
following an appeal by Charles, Prince of Wales, and, also, by
Tony Blair, after spending 18 years in a Pakistani gaol even
though deemed innocent of murder in the accidental killing of a
taxi driver. As was mentioned above, near the paintings, my daughter Katharine was here
today, one day after the news that my elder daughter Sarah had
married on the previous Monday, 13th., November. Her baby is due
in three weeks. Away, away eastward in Merrie England. I wish I could
find a real job, and visit her, and take Katharine with me. Not
far away from reaching the recommended retiring age, but I'd
rather be profitably employed.

Went to Retro yesterday: no goodies there at the moment. Looking
for drives, rack mounts, switches, sound cards, video and SCSI
cards, memory chips, and grabbing whatever arrives. All in good
time, one hopes.

November 28th., 2006: Once I had updated
the BIOS to match what I'd done with another of the four
ProLiant 800 ancient but good servers that inhabit my cell, I
discovered that it wouldn't start. Disc error, etc., occurred.
Necessitated opening the beast and rearranging the SCSI cards,
because now that one of them was recognised by the BIOS when it
hadn't been previously, it found itself first in the queue.
Placing the Adaptec 29160n into a lower numbered slot cured that
silly problem. But, now that the BIOS had been updated, and all
of the
drives recognised, I was able thereafter to have Ahead Nero work
on the SCSI rewritable drive. Little things mean a lot.

Apropos that final statement, I had my younger
daughter visit me a week ago. She tells me that in her school in
Montréal she has been asked if the Holocaust is real. What? Mon
dieu, these bloody ignorant Catholic twits yet, in their anti-semitic
fogs, able to disseminate garbage to the young. Lets hope that
my elder daughter has better luck with her progeny, now that the
prospect of my grandfatherhood rapidly approacheth.

December 13th., 2006: Yesterday, I was at
Ottawa Congress Centre for the Microsoft Ready for a New Day
exposé of Vista, Forefront, Exchange 2007 and Office 2007. Very
interesting, although it forced my damaged hip to seeming pieces,
very painful, a result of the
usual uncomfortable seating. I was there for well over nine
hours, but most of the speakers were entertaining and
informative. One thing that was clearly apparent: over 50% of
the speakers were obese. Do not a techie be, methinks. Poor
food, long hours, sitting in a chair will lead to this modern
day scourge.

One thing that one of the main presenters said,
is that he quite likes IE7. Well, so do I, but with it's use
with XP Pro SP2, it will not complete a custom update. This is
the error that appears, and is one which is not present when
using IE6 on my other', Windows 2000 Server, boxes. I am wrong,
it happens on one of my Win2kAS boxes, but not on any others.It is clear that not everything that Microsoft
implements works to our advantage. None of my XP Pro boxes work
with custom updates. When I use an automatic setting I have to
wait until my machines come up on their lists: can anyone imagine
how many computers Microsoft has to service?

One of the main presenters was Michael Treacy, a
Canadian of Irish parentage, who was an MIT professor, and is
still based in Boston, but who now hires people from around the
world with his
Gen3 company. He has a main pool of scientists working
out of that den of democratic iniquity, St Petersburg, in
Russia. Cheap but good labour. Mr Treacy was to me one of the
better speakers, with an excellent, mature patter. He spoke
about the misunderstanding of the relative numbers of outsourced
workers in the US, and how the David Ricardo statement about
comparative advantage refers to the modern world equally well
now as it did when first promulgated. Fascinating stuff to
bookworms such as I.
Here is a pdf that includes some of the slides that he used
in his presentation. It might state confidential, but it was
available on his website?! One other thing: no email to him is
accepted, it is always returned by my server stating cannot
complete operation. Not user friendly, what?